America’s first great literary feminist, Judith Sargent Murray, published this essay two years before Mary Wollstonecraft’s more famous Vindication of the Rights of Women appeared. Like Wollstonecraft (1759–97), Murray argued that if most women suffered from the lack “of a cultivated mind,” it was because men refused to provide them with an equal education:

But imbecility is still confin’d,
And by the lordly sex to us consign’d;
They rob us of the power t’improve,
And then declare we only trifles love;
Yet haste the era, when the world shall know,
That such distinctions only dwell below;
The soul unfetter’d, to no sex confin’d,
Was for the abodes of cloudless day design’d.

Courtesy of the Massachusetts Historical Society